pose, generated partly by impatience of study, partly by want of sufficient genius, and no doubt, also, by a sense of superiority to artists who could do nothing but draw correctly, he cared for no time, place, or circumstance, in his pictures. A set of prints, after his designs, for Shakspeare and Cowper, exhibit a chaos of mingled genius and absurdity, such as, perhaps, was never before seen. He endeavoured to bring Michael Angelo's apostles and prophets, with their superhuman ponderousness of intention, into the common-places of modern life. A student reading in a garden, is all over intensity of muscle; and the quiet tea-table scene in Cowper, he has turned into a preposterous conspiracy of huge men and women, all bent on showing their thews and postures, with dresses as fantastical as their minds. One gentleman, of the existence of whose trousers you are not aware till you see the terminating line at the ankle, is sitting and looking grim on a sofa, with his hat on and no waistcoat. Yet there is real genius in his designs for Milton, though disturbed, as usual, by strainings after the energetic. His most extraordinary mistake, after all, is said to have been on the subject of his colouring. It was a sort of livid green, like brass diseased. Yet they say, that when praised for one of his pictures, he would modestly observe, "It is a pretty colour." This might have been thought a jest on his part, if remarkable stories

were not told of the mistakes made by other people with regard to colour. Sight seems the least agreed upon, of all the senses.

Fuseli was lively and interesting in conversation, but not without his usual faults of violence and pretension. Nor was he always as decorous as an old man ought to be; especially one whose turn of mind is not of the lighter and more pleasurable cast. The licences he took were coarse, and had not sufficient regard to his company. Certainly they went a great deal beyond his friend Armstrong; to whose account, I believe, Fuseli's passion for swearing was laid. The poet condescended to be a great swearer, and Fuseli thought it energetic to swear like him. His friendship with Bonnycastle had something childlike and agreeable in it. They came and went away together, for years, like a couple of old schoolboys. They, also, like boys, rallied one another, and sometimes made a singular display of it,—Fuseli, at least ; for it was he that was the aggressor. I remember, one day, Bonnycastle told a story of a Frenchman, whom he had received at his house at Woolwich, and who invited him, in return, to visit him in Paris, if ever he should cross the water. "The Frenchman told me," said he, "that he had a superb local. When I went to Paris I called on him, and found he had a good prospect out of his window; but his superb local was at a hair-dresser's, up two pair of stairs."

“Vell, vell!” said Fuseli, impatiently (for, though he spoke and wrote English remarkably well, he never got rid of his Swiss pronunciation),—“ Vell— vay not? vay not? Vat is to hinder his local being superb for all thtat ?"

"I don't see," returned Bonnycastle, "how a barber's house in an alley can be a superb local."

"You doan't! Vell-but thtat is not the barber's fault-It is yours."

"How do

you make that out? I'm not an alley." "No; but you're coarsedly eegnorant."

"I may be as ignorant as you are polite; but you don't prove anything."

"Thte thtevil I doant! Did you not say he had a faine prospect out of window ?"

"Yes, he had a prospect fine enough!"

"Vell, thtat constituted his superb local. A superb local is not a barber's shop, by Goade! but a faine situation. But thtat is your coarsed eegnorance of thte language."

Another time, on Bonnycastle's saying that there were no longer any auto-da-fés, Fuseli said he did not know that. "At all events," said he, if you were to go into Spain, they would have an auto-da-fé immediately, oan thte strength of your appearance."

Bonnycastle was a good fellow. He was a tall, gaunt, long-headed man, with large features and spectacles, and a deep internal voice, with a twang

of rusticity in it; and he goggled over his plate, like a horse. I often thought that a bag of corn would have hung well on him. His laugh was equine, and showed his teeth upwards at the sides. Wordsworth, who notices similar mysterious manifestations on the part of donkeys, would have thought it ominous. Bonnycastle was passionately fond of quoting Shakspeare. and telling stories; and if the Edinburgh Review had just come out, would give us all the jokes in it. He had once an hypochondriacal disorder of long duration; and he told us, that he should never forget the comfortable sensation given him one night during this disorder, by his knocking a landlord, that was insolent to him, down the man's staircase. On the strength of this piece of energy (having first ascertained that the offender was not killed) he went to bed, and had a sleep of unusual soundness. Perhaps Bonnycastle thought more highly of his talents than the amount of them strictly warranted; a mistake to which scientific men appear to be more liable than others, the universe they work in being so large, and their universality (in Bacon's sense of the word) being often so small. But the delusion was not only pardonable, but desirable, in a man so zealous in the performance of his duties, and so much of a human being to all about him, as Bonnycastle was. It was delightful one day to hear him speak with compla

cency of a translation which had appeared of one of his books in Arabic, and which began by saying, on the part of the translator, that "it had pleased God, for the advancement of human knowledge, to raise us up a Bonnycastle." Some of his stories were a little romantic, and no less authentic. He had an anecdote of a Scotchman, who boasted of being descended from the Admirable Crichton; in proof of which, the Scotchman said he had "a grit quantity of table-leenen in his possassion, marked A. C., Admirable Creechton."

Kinnaird, the magistrate, was a stout sanguine man, under the middle height, with a fine lamping black eye, lively to the last, and a person that "had increased, was increasing, and ought to have been diminished;" which is by no means what he thought of the prerogative. Next to his bottle he was fond of his Horace; and, in the intervals of business at the police-office, would enjoy both in his arm-chair. Between the vulgar calls of this kind of magistracy, and the perusal of the urbane Horace, there must have been a gusto of contradiction, which the bottle, perhaps, was required to render quite palateable. Fielding did not love his bottle the less for being obliged to lecture the drunken. Nor did his son, who succeeded him in taste and office. I know not how a former poet-laureat, Mr. Pye, managed ;—another man of letters, who was fain to accept a situation